Receive the latest entertainment-news updates in your inbox

In this Feb. 12, 2015 photo, Japanese animated film director Isao Takahata speaks about his latest film "The Tale of The Princess Kaguya" with its poster during an interview at his office, Studio Ghibli, in suburban Tokyo. Takahata, co-founder of the prestigious Japanese animator Studio Ghibli that stuck to a hand-drawn "manga" look in the face of digital filmmaking, has died. He was 82. Takahata, who directed "Grave of the Fireflies," a tragic tale about wartime childhood, died Thursday, April 5, 2018, of lung cancer at a Tokyo hospital, according to a studio statement.

Isao Takahata, co-founder of the prestigious Japanese animator Studio Ghibli that stuck to a hand-drawn "manga" look in the face of digital filmmaking, has died. He was 82.

Takahata started Ghibli with Oscar-winning animator Hayao Miyazaki in 1985, hoping to create Japan's Disney. He directed "Grave of the Fireflies," a tragic tale about wartime childhood, and produced some of the studio's films, including Miyazaki's 1984 "Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind," which tells the horror of environmental disaster through a story about a princess.

Takahata died Thursday of lung cancer at a Tokyo hospital, according to a studio statement Friday.

He was fully aware how the floating sumie-brush sketches of faint pastel in his works stood as a stylistic challenge to Hollywood's computer-graphics cartoons.

In a 2015 interview with The Associated Press, Takahata talked about how Edo-era woodblock-print artists like Hokusai had the understanding of Western-style perspective and the use of light, but they purposely chose to depict reality with lines, and in a flat way, with minimal shading.

That, he said, was at the heart of Japanese "manga," or comics.

"It is about the essence that's behind the drawing," he said at Ghibli's picturesque office in suburban Tokyo.

Although he did not win an Oscar, Takahata won many other awards, including those from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the Lorcano International Film Festival.

Strong female characters were a Takahata trademark.

He was planning to do a film about exploited girls, forced to work as nannies with infants strapped on their backs. Most lullabies in Japan were not for parents singing babies to sleep, but for such young women, crying out about their suffering, Takahata had said.